Bay Area News Project

This is interesting. A lot of the analysis I've seen on the news industry reveals more about the parent companies than the financial value of newsrooms. This NYT article, for instance, cites McClatchy's declining ad revenue but doesn't mention the billions of debt McClatchy took on when it bought Knight-Ridder. Papers don't start with a clean fiscal slate each year, so simply looking at net income won't tell you if a newsroom is earning its keep. What impact does such debt & interest have on McClatchy's bottom line? Knowing that would bring the value of the 'secular' portion of the operation into better focus (to use the article's lingo). If you dig into the report highlighted in the article you can find a little bit more on this subject...

"Some newspapers began losing money, and the depressed earnings of many others were not enough to service the debt that their owners had run up while continuing to buy new properties." p. 16

"But the bill, which has not moved anywhere in Congress, does not address how a newspaper losing money, especially one saddled with significant debt or other liabilities, could be converted into a viable nonprofit." p. 22... See More

"As noted earlier, the current economic conditions of many newspapers and the overhanging debt of some of their owners make it unlikely that many of them could be converted into viable nonprofits anyway." p. 81

The report, The Reconstruction of American Journalism, can be found here: http://bit.ly/2WWCZ9.

just to clarify, Frank isn't the dean -- it's Neil Henry. i believe Frank is the reporter.